I’ve been representing policyholders in insurance coverage litigation for 35 years, and I’m convinced that I’ll never understand the logic of insurance company claim departments. They settle cases that I think they might want to fight, and they fight cases tooth-and-nail that I think they really should settle. (Maybe it’s me.)
The carrier’s claim file…
I hesitated to write this blog post, which is intended to be nonpolitical. We’re currently in the middle of an exceedingly nasty election season, and any topic that even remotely touches on politics is likely to lead to online mayhem. But I was intrigued by the confirmation hearings I watched yesterday for President Trump’s Supreme…
We have a coverage case in the office that’s 15 years old, with no end in sight. The amazing thing is, it’s not even a particularly complicated case. I don’t want to go into too much detail or give the names of the parties, because the matter is still pending. But even if we eventually…
My maternal grandfather, Pasquale Cupito, was a legend. I have far too many stories to list here, but one of them involves a giant garbage can lid that he used as a cooking utensil. See, he could make a mean homemade pizza, but there was never enough to keep everyone satisfied. One day he concluded…
I promise not to discuss COVID-19 in detail in this post. The recent deluge of hot legal takes about the pandemic may be making a lot of people sicker than the virus itself. So, let’s talk about a different, earlier disaster.
Believe it or not, eight years after the winds of Hurricane Sandy struck New…
In the 2008 film Wall-E, Earth is a post-apocalyptic wasteland with nothing on it but the abandoned remnants of human society, and a forlorn, trash-compacting robot. The robot’s only living company is a pet cockroach named Hal, which I guess is Pixar’s nod to the popular notion that cockroaches will outlive us all. (Or…
Here’s a piece of useless trivia for you. You know that old saying that something “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”? The saying apparently originated back in 1861, when Count Johann Bernhard von Rechberg und Rothenlöwen (remember him?), an Austrian statesman, was presented with a document recognizing Italy as a nation-state, and first uttered…
Not long ago, there was a kerfuffle over the use of the term “OK, Boomer,” which I guess is a pejorative term aimed at my generation for being out-of-touch with the modern world. (See the Vox article here.) Truth be told, maybe we are out of touch, at least about some things. As someone…
In the “Cheese Shop” sketch from the old Monty Python comedy series, John Cleese plays a customer trying to buy some cheese from “Ye National Cheese Emporium, purveyor of fine cheese to the gentry (and the poverty-stricken too)”. The cheese shop proprietor, played by Michael Palin, seems to have no cheese in stock, not even…
If you’re involved in the legal business for any length of time, every once in a while, you’ll come across a case in which the facts are so horrible, and the result so seemingly wrongheaded, that you can’t help but feel that our entire system has failed. A recent decision from the Third Circuit, Arena…